Pandering to the crackpot left

It looks like Teresa Heinz Kerry is rubbing off on her husband. And on Sen. Hillary Clinton. For the Republican Party, this is a very good thing.

You'll recall that last month, Mrs. Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tinfoil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mrs. Heinz Kerry openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Mrs. Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Cue the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" soundtrack. And keep the mashed potatoes away from Mrs. Heinz Kerry.

Asked for evidence of her "mother machine"-hacking theory, the ketchup heiress refused further comment. Glitches happen. And no technology is fool-proof. But unhinged Democrats have obsessed on the fact that the chief executive of Diebold, the leading vote machine manufacturer, is a Bush supporter in order to turn inevitable errors into a nefarious Vote-Swallowing Grand Master Plan.

The mother machine theorists also cite the discrepancies between exit polls and vote tallies to bolster their suspicions. But as liberal journalist David Corn pointed out, "screwy exit polls do raise questions, but they are not proof of sabotage. And left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory theories." On the one hand, they accuse Diebold and other vendors of "put[ting] in the fix via the paperless touch-screen machines." On the other hand, they claim that conspirators in Florida rigged "optical-scan voting, not electronic touch-screen voting." Or is it both?

A Unified Mother and Father Machine Convergence Conspiracy?

Back on planet Earth, Corn notes that scholars at Cornell, Harvard and Stanford dismissed the Florida fraud allegations as "baseless." And the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results.

Immediately after the election, John Kerry avoided the deepest fever swamps of the crackpot Left. But Teresa's kooky pillow-talk has apparently taken effect. On Sunday, Sen. Kerry dredged up allegations of Republican trickery and voter scare tactics in a speech before the League of Women Voters: ''Last year, too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated.''

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